What is EAD?

EAD stands for Encoded Archival Description, and is a non-proprietary de facto standard for the encoding of finding aids for use in a networked (online) environment. Finding aids are inventories, indexes, or guides that are created by archival and manuscript repositories to provide information about specific collections. While the finding aids may vary somewhat in style, their common purpose is to provide detailed description of the content and intellectual organization of collections of archival materials. EAD allows the standardization of collection information in finding aids within and across repositories.

EAD like many encoding or markup langauges such the HTML you are reading on this page is formally defined by a DTD, or Document Type Definition. This is a machine-readable set of rules that specify how the EAD document-- formally called an instance-- is to be written. However, unlike HTML which is designed to present information in a webpage, EAD is designed to semantically identify units of information useful for archivists and researchers using primary source materials in archival collections. For example, where HTML might use <font sixe="14">This 14 point text.</font> to define a text of a certain presentational size, EAD almost exclusively uses presentation-independent declarations such as <relatedmaterial>See Boxes 2-15 of the WXYZ Collection</relatedmaterial>..

EAD has been in use now in the archival community for over ten years from its origin as a research project at the University of California Berkley. Originally conceived of as an application of SGML (Standard Generalized Mark-up Language) , most EAD instance documents are these days encoded in XML (Extensible Mark-up Language), which is really a much simplified version of its parent language, SGML. Many thousands of archival repositories around the world have implemented EAD, and some of those are listed here: EAD Roundtable list of EAD Implementors.

The Current version of EAD is known as EAD 2002, which you should use if you are just starting your exploration of EAD. But over the last 10 years the EAD DTD has undergone many revisions, so you may hear talk of EAD version 1.0, and even of the beta version. These are superceded by EAD 2002.

A fairly comprehensive history of, and motivations for, the development of EAD can be found at the Library of Congress' website: Development of the Encoded Archival Description DTD